Digital Marketing for your Business: 8 Elements Explained

Impulsive, unpredictable, and unstable – that’s what the digital marketing industry is! The moment you felt confident about your new campaign, a promising network raised its head, adding to your woes. Or perhaps one of your brainwave ideas resulted in a campaign that lost steam and fizzled out, quickly. For a sustainable digital marketing campaign, it is important to strike a balance between current trends, networks that have already worked for you, accurate budgets, and, of course, the right product!

In 2014, the social media network user-base reached 1.8 billion, and breached the 2 billion mark in 2015. With this kind of potential, it is necessary to get online marketing strategies right to ensure good returns and ROI, long-term success, and sustainability. In this article, we have identified a few such strategies that should be on your digital marketing checklist for the next few months.

Step #1: Review Your Current Digital Marketing Plan

The first step in generating a digital marketing plan for the next year is by reviewing your performance from the year before. Here are a few questions to help you review your team’s performance:

Which strategy worked and helped you increase revenue?

Which marketing campaigns flopped?

What was your customer’s feedback on your advertising and marketing initiatives?

Did you achieve your targets last year?

Has your target market changed? Have you started planning on strategies for your new target market?

Are you keeping pace with the competition in the market?

Step #2: Take To Content Marketing

Content Marketing is a strategic marketing approach that is focused on creating and distributing content, to gain customer engagement. By publishing content pieces on several platforms – social media blog posts, LinkedIn articles, exclusively created content for Facebook posts, online journals, magazines, and even digital newspapers – content marketers use these write-ups to generate inbound links. Not just that, for organizations, content marketing is the least expensive form for marketing. And with Content Marketing, efficiency directly translates to better profits.

Step #3: Create Downloadable Content

Content is king, and getting the right writing team on board should top your content bucket list! This year downloadable content like videos, infographics, and e-books are the game-changers for most firms. Great articles that are informative, helpful, and add long-term value to customers should be created and promoted in order to engage existing customers and acquire new ones.

Surveys indicate that the average reader reads only about 30% of the words on any given page, meaning the emphasis should be upon creating more interactive content that is low on word count but compels readers to click, scroll, and even comment on those posts.

Step #4: Personalize Your Marketing Campaigns

In an interview, Piers North, strategy director at Yahoo UK, suggested that the greatest opportunity for marketers today was in managing personalized content on mobile devices. Although not an easy task, this personalization will attract customer attention and help create brand loyalty, in turn. It is important to involve your customer in your marketing activities.

Be it a user-generated story sharing contest or a photo-sharing contest, encourage your followers on social media to participate and engage with your brand. While sending out emails, make it a point to send out personalized email communications, with even the subject line inviting them to participate. For e-commerce brands, product suggestions based on the customer’s previous purchases will lead to increased sales.

Step #5: Set Up A Robust SEO Strategy!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the method of increasing website traffic by enhancing its rank on search engines. SEO is a combination of enhancing quality of content on the webpage, by adding relevant keywords, subheads bullet points, clear hyperlinks, and optimizing the site’s HTML code so that search engines can identify what is on the page and display it as a result of a particular search.

SEO then becomes the bottom rung of a ladder for a marketer to know their end-customer. As more and more people use the web to access information, search engines are the new go-to places for research on any product, service, or information. This has helped the SEO industry grows by leaps and bounds.

Step #6: Get Your Social Media Marketing Team In Place

Thanks to social media, the world of 2015 has become a small place indeed! With the average person spending at least an hour a day on a social networking website, it is important to put this avenue to good use as a marketing tool. Social Media is among the fastest-growing segments in online marketing, where you will employ techniques and strategies on social media websites to increase traffic to your website, promote your brand and protect your online reputation.

Step #7: Future-Proof Your Business With Mobile Marketing And Analytics!

Even though it has been famously claimed that ‘content marketing is the only kind of marketing left’, a keen digital marketing expert will not overlook a major digital segment – the world of mobile and cloud computing. As the world continues to move toward becoming mobile-ready, getting your marketing strategies right on the mobile platform is a top-notch priority for most marketers.

Before you begin planning out your mobile marketing strategies, you would first need to analyze the competition –such as the volume of traffic to rival websites similar to yours- their preferences, user-behavior of the visitors to your website. In order to acquire this data, you need to have the right web analytics tool: Google Analytics is the most preferred freely available analytics tool in the world.

Analytics also helps you improve your site’s performance and implement better marketing campaigns; you need tracking and analyzing how people use your websites and applications. In order to make the most of the mobile market, you need to be better-equipped to monitor any mobile marketing campaign and also conceptualize and implement a mobile marketing strategy on your own. In order to learn the best practices used to interact with the mobile consumer, address security and privacy issues, and launch mobile campaigns that impact sales and brand loyalty, you may consider enrolling in a Mobile marketing certification course from an accredited, globally-renowned course provider.

Step #8: Devise A Kickass Email Marketing Plan!

Email marketing still tops the list for most efficient advertising tactics, as this type of digital marketing has been opted for by the customer himself! A potential customer who receives informative, personalized emails with offers will have an advantage of getting information before others or of an exclusive offer! At the same time, campaigns that are well strategized can motivate people to visit your site, and though they don’t buy your stuff, they will at least enroll for your newsletter. This way, you have a lead that can be converted, if nurtured properly.

About the Author

Avantika holds a degree in Journalism, & writes on such topics of interest as PMP, Digital Marketing, Six Sigma, & Big Data. She also maintains a travelogue, blogs on media issues, and volunteers at a boarding home for stray dogs. She enjoys art & travelling, & loves outdoor activities like basketball, athletics, & swimming.